Reacting Forward (3): Transition to A Home Office

A real life example always helps:

Getting it virtually wrong

My friend Phil had recently lost his job as CEO. His style of management was to surround himself with a mastermind group of highly paid Vice Presidents with massive egos. Hence he filled his days with an endless round of meetings.

Phil was a hard worker; in the office before anyone else, and last to leave. I never saw him take a day off. He was fair-minded, highly intelligent, and the staff liked him, but he struggled to make the difficult decisions himself. He relied so heavily on the abilities and recommendations of his mastermind group that he became blind to the fact that they fed him only what they thought he wanted to hear and what made them look good in his eyes.

Getting the boot hit him hard, and he decided to leave the corporate world he had known for thirty years to start his own consultancy company. After years of stressful commuting on congested freeways, he told me how much he was looking forward to the freedom of working his business from home as well as being away from office politics.

Phil spent all his working life in a traditional office environment. His routine was to try to beat the rush-hour traffic by getting to the building before 8 a.m. and not leaving until after 6 p.m. for the same reason. His day was planned out by his personal assistant and consisted of meetings with department heads and phone conferences with his board of directors and advisers. Twice a day he walked through the office, making sure to speak with as many of his staff as possible. He usually skipped lunch, but every Friday he allowed the staff to dress casually while he held a lunchtime staff meeting. His office door was always open, and he encouraged people to stop in for a chat. As commendable as that is, most employees are intimidated by the CEO title, so his frequent visitors were the senior managers.

Any habit, especially one formed over thirty years, is hard for us to change. The brain is hardwired to repeat certain traits and behaviors. To suddenly go from a busy and traditional schedule of human interaction to the isolation of working from home is as big an adjustment as transitioning to civilian life after military service, or jumping into the working world after college. I had tried to warn Phil not to underestimate the difficulty of the transition, that it can take months to adjust, and that it requires great discipline to develop productive new habits while working from home. Most people assume that it is an easy thing to do, and from his body language, I could tell Phil was ignoring my advice.

Several months later, Phil confessed to me that he was finding the change very hard, and in fact so difficult that he was considering quitting his business and returning to a regular work environment. I visited him at his apartment, a splendid penthouse with panoramic views of the ocean. Floor-to-ceiling windows allowed sunlight to fill every space. As majestic as the view was, it would be hard not to be distracted by the waterfront activity below.

Phil’s apartment was contemporary and minimalistic. I asked him to show me his office space. With a sweep of his hand, he gestured around the apartment.

Phil had made all the classic errors I had warned him to avoid. He confessed that he sometimes lay in bed later than he should, and on those days he would simply stay in his pajamas, set up his laptop on the kitchen table and start work. Oftentimes he did not shower or shave until midday. It is so tempting to check email first thing after rising, and before you know it half the day has gone and you are still in your pajamas. He had constant access to the refrigerator, and there were used dishes everywhere that explained his extra pounds since he stopped commuting to an office.

He said loneliness was the hardest thing to adjust to. As a CEO in the traditional setting people sought him out, and his office was always busy. He had an assistant to manage his calendar, and bring him coffee. They always chatted about personal matters as much as business. He knew their families and had met many of them. He had prided himself on having an “open-door” policy at work, and although he was a humble man all of that pilgrimage to his office subtly boosted his ego. Employees rarely speak out of turn to the CEO, and most leaders only hear positive things about themselves and the company they run. He had the same blind spots as any other CEO.

Without that frequent reassurance of his leadership role, he admitted to feeling depressed at times. His energy levels were low and he thought he might have developed an endocrine issue of some sort. The effects were showing up in his business, because he found it difficult to muster up the necessary enthusiasm in his voice when speaking with potential clients, and he sometimes did not have even the motivation to call people back when they left a message. As I listened to him confess, I realized he was showing early symptoms of depression brought on by what amounted to self-enforced solitary confinement.

For the first few weeks, he said some of his ex-colleagues had called him to see how he was doing with the new company venture, but eventually those calls fizzled out. To alleviate the seclusion, he started calling them to check how the old company was doing in his absence. It was like a retired coach who can’t stay away from the training ground. Before long, he sensed that his ex-colleagues were ignoring his calls whenever they saw his number on the display.

Phil said he liked the sense of freedom from routine, and that sometimes he exercised in the mornings and caught up with work later at night. At other times he put the TV on in the background, and liked the fact he could check on his stock trades while working.

Phil had committed every home office crime in the book. He needed rehabilitation, and I started it by getting him to promise that with everything he did, with every detail of his daily schedule, he would ask himself out loud “would this be appropriate behavior in the traditional office?” In other words, if it were inappropriate in his old way of life, why would it be acceptable now?

I asked him to think about what would have happened when he was CEO if he sometimes lay in bed, or turned up to work in his slippers and pajamas? How productive would he have been if he set up his laptop in the company cafeteria?

Working from home requires not just the same discipline as going to a regular job, but much more. The source of motivation used to be a pay-check and a need to be seen as a good performer by bosses and peers. Now the source is just you. Not everybody has a high degree of self-discipline, and Paul’s lack of it surprised me. Such a strong and forceful personality in the regular office, I had not expected him to trip up so easily at home.

Humans seem to need routines, and breaking them can lead to stress and depression. We need rules, regulations, and schedules at home as much, if not more so, than in a work environment. Otherwise, running a virtual business will quickly cease to inspire us, and we will become like a hopeless addict, procrastinating and grabbing any distraction, as we go back to the fridge or the TV when we should be working.

It is by no means easy and one has to be a obsessive about it. I can recall falling out with family and friends who were visiting us from the UK. They all worked in traditional offices and found it hard to accept that I could work from home. When I refused to change my schedule to join them for lunch or hang out in the back yard they thought I was just being pedantic, or that I was sending them a ‘not welcome here’ message. Thick skin and hard headed attitude are needed.